Creating a Loan Origination Portal for one of the Biggest Private Lending Vendors in California

Client Background 

Our client is a private money lender established in 2014 by its parent companies, Wedgewood Inc. and HMC Assets LLC. They aim to provide lending solutions for investors who do not fit within the traditional lending criteria. Our client specializes in providing Mortgage Brokers, Borrowers, Investors and Real Estate Agents with funding for investment property acquisition and refinancing. They are held liable and trustworthy by providing loans using their own institutional capital.

Previous Situation 

Traditional lending companies have always been slow when it comes to the loan approval process. It would take a borrower fifteen to thirty days to get approved for a loan and the process would require a lot of manual work to be done by multiple parties. Loan requests would be heavily scrutinized due to the time and effort required in evaluating a multitude of factors such as: credit score, income, a borrower’s assets, etc. The barrier of entry and requirements for getting a home loan was out of the reach of the everyday consumer.

Our client aimed to differentiate themselves from their competitors by not only approving and financing non-traditional cliental but doing it faster than any other company in the lending industry. With a good reputation and strong capital, they experienced an explosive growth as it made a unique mark on the home leading industry. However, with tremendous success and client acquisition, our client was starting to feel the pain points of too much demand and not enough supply.

1. Security concerns – Borrowers would email unencrypted documents that include highly confidential information such as social security numbers, background checks, credit card numbers, credit check reports, and other privileged information to their account executives.  This left a lot of privileged information vulnerable to compromise.
2. Transparency to customers (external users) – currently, a customer would need to call the Account Executives to ask about the status of their loan or anything generic inquiry.  The response times were dependent on how quickly the account executive could get back to the customer.
3. Limitations in lead generation and client acquisition rates due to communication, inquiring, and approval process being manual.
4. Rapid growth –   There’s a good market and private lenders are doing well, which has created a need to increase bandwidth and help facilitate growth and provide true automation; giving them the competitive advantage since a lot of others in the industry use Encompass and face the same issues.
5. Tracking and metrics – unable to track how many loans have been applied for, how many are pending, who clicked, who logged in.

With no shortage of operational concerns, Civic engaged with Speridian to develop a solution that would address these pain points.

Results

Speridian created the loan origination portal for our client leveraging our knowledge of the Microsoft Azure Cloud and .NET code. The portal has a clean and simple front-end website interface that connects to 3rd party back-end systems seamlessly. A client can go through the loan approval process, end to end, from pre-qualification, pre-approval, processing, and underwriting, using the online portal. 

In the past, a borrower would reach out to an account executive and fill out endless paper documents for submission.  If there was any mistake, both the borrower and account executive would have to restart the whole process.  With the loan origination portal, the borrower can fill out online forms with built-in validation that checks the accuracy of the information entered.  A borrower is alerted if the information is incorrect and has the ability to re-write and resubmit.  When a borrower does need to upload a document, it can be uploaded in the same portal and done securely with industry-leading encryption.  No longer does a user have to worry about an email being compromised leaking privileged information such as social security numbers, background checks, credit card numbers, credit check reports, etc. 

In addition to this quality of life features for clients, accounts executives equally benefit from the workflow automation that the loan origination portal provides.  Previously account executives had spent 35% of the inbound call time in resolving low tier issues and answering basic questions.  With the portal being able to provide useful information, tooltips, and guidelines, account executives can focus on the final loan authorization and closing lending deals.  With the loan origination portal, an account executive can be alerted of qualified loans to be processed in a matter of 12 seconds. The portal also records data entered by users first hand and provides accessible market data and metrics that our client’s marketing team uses for lead and demand generation. With workflow automation and value-added services being delivered via the loan origination portal, our client has been able to digitally transform in the private lending industry.  By revolutionizing the way loans are submitted and processed, they can sustain their client growth and scale their lending business, without slowing down their account executives. Previously the loan submission life cycle would take 18 days on average from initiation to closing. With the portal, this average has been reduced to just 10 days.  With feature expansion coming to the loan origination portal and increased efficiency, our client can grow to become the primer private lending authority of the South Bay.